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In Pajamas Media, Roger Kimball posts on Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek article and the following firestorm of left-wing invective.
… Ferguson writes:
Welcome to Obama’s America … nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return — almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation — half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.
We are fast becoming a two-tier nation, a small band of makers and an increasingly large band of takers.
This is just the beginning of the bad news which Ferguson has assembled. He goes on to marshal the facts about Obama’s profligate spending, U.S. debt, the true cost of ObamaCare, and more. What Ferguson has to say about Obama’s handling of the foreign policy challenges facing America is especially sobering:
Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed — perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize — that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.
Bottom line on the foreign policy front: “America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement.”
I said that I found Ferguson’s analysis damning. So, I gather, did the Left. For out of those mephitic swamps of “progressive” animus has risen a great cloud of anguished repudiation. It’s a violent, unpleasant, and ultimately unconvincing display, but it is certainly full of angry pathos.
It has already elicited from Ferguson a long, detailed, and utterly deadly point-by-point reply, which is as entertaining as it is authoritative. Ferguson begins with a splendid quotation from the historian Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Macaulay had not had the experience of witnessing the left-wing commentariat tie itself in moralistic knots in its hapless attempt to answer facts with name-calling. Connoisseurs of futility will find it as entertaining as psychologists will find it alarming.
Ferguson shows in unanswerable detail that his critics adopt a three-pronged strategy of evasiveness. First, they avoid his central arguments. Second, they claim to be challenging the facts he has marshaled, when all they really do is purvey opinions masquerading as facts. Third, they nitpick and name-call. …
Matthew Continetti’s take down of Jane Mayer’s latest in the New Yorker (“Schmooze or Lose” ) takes awhile to hit its stride, but then it is strong. Read this and see why the New Yorker is top Obama flack in the Northeast media.
I don’t know whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will win on November 6, but I do know what the MSNBC talking heads will say in the event that Obama loses. They will say that Republican billionaires bought the election; that Republican legislators suppressed the minority vote through onerous photo identification requirements; and that Romney frightened white working class voters into thinking Obama favored minorities over other groups. They will say the 2010 Citizens United decision allowed Republican billionaires to inject undisclosed “dark money” into American politics, and Democrats could not compete because they had no financial interest at stake, no Charles Koch or Sheldon Adelson of their own.
I also know that every rationale uttered by Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz will advance their theological belief in the moral purity and benevolent intentions of modern day progressives. This foundational idea—that Republicans act out of self-interest while Democrats act out of the public interest—is the keystone to the self-conceptualization and self-idealization of your everyday Democrat. It’s simplistic and bogus. And it is the biggest myth of campaign 2012.
Take for example the left-wing activist Jane Mayer’s latest article in the New Yorker,…
… “Schmooze or Lose” had not been on newsstands for more than a few days when the New York Times came out with a blockbuster report on the administration’s relationship with the Exelon Corporation, an Illinois-based utility giant whose executives “were early and frequent supporters of Mr. Obama as he rose from the Illinois State Senate to the White House.” Rahm Emanuel helped create this energy beast. David Axelrod consulted for it. One of Exelon’s board members, Jim Rogers, is the chairman of another huge utility, Duke Energy, and a major backer of this year’s Democratic National Convention. “White House records show that Exelon executives were able to secure an unusually large number of meetings with top administration officials at key moments in the consideration of environmental regulations that have been drafted in a way that hurt Exelon’s competitors, but curb the high cost of compliance for Exelon and its industry allies,” the Times reported. I hasten to add that the Washington Free Beacon broke the story of how Exelon “won a 20-year contract to provide renewable energy to 10 State Department facilities, including its Foggy Bottom headquarters, as well as a portion of the White House campus” with solar panels manufactured in American prisons.
Does Jane Mayer read? This is not a rhetorical question. She quotes another anonymous donor who asks, “Where’s Penny Pritzker? Where’s George Soros?” Yet one does not need a GPS to discover that the Hyatt heiress Pritzker was on Air Force One with the president in late July, when the discussion no doubt was confined to how Pritzker “would like to be involved.” One of Mayer’s informants says that the hedge fund billionaire Soros, who like Pritzker has given the maximum individual contribution to Obama, “is not inclined to take an outsized role in the 2012 campaign.” Why? A “Democratic donor” says: “He feels hurt.” Aw. Or maybe he’s tied up with his twenty-something ex-girlfriend’s $50-million lawsuit; or planning his upcoming wedding to a 40-year-old video yoga instructor; or investing in Manchester United after the soccer team inked a $600 million endorsement deal with U.S. government-backed GM.
Or maybe Soros is busy with the Democracy Alliance, the secretive organization of Democratic donors that he helped organized in 2005 and in which he continues to participate. Mayer describes the Alliance as “a group of wealthy liberal donors led by Rob McKay, an heir to the Taco Bell fortune.” That is true, but Mayer does not mention Soros’s involvement in the organization. The ace reporter who exposed the secretive Koch brothers does not even deign to note that the Democracy Alliance refuses to disclose the identities of its members, let alone the organizations that receive their generous financial support. She focuses instead on shoe magnate Arnold Hiatt: “In November, Hiatt asked the President to speak to the group, but Obama declined; the White House said that he was too busy.” Ah, well. I guess that settles it. No Democracy Alliance for Obama.
Except here, too, Mayer omits inconvenient truths. Joe Biden must not be busy at all, because he personally addressed a Democracy Alliance conference in November 2011, a few months before the Alliance made the strategic decision to focus more on electing Democrats to office and less on the utopian cause of the moment. Nor was Obama “too busy” in January of this year, when his motorcade spirited him to the St. Regis hotel near the White House, where he solicited funds at an event organized by McKay and whose attendees, according to Politico, were “mostly alliance members.” Neither solicitation appears in the New Yorker. Indeed, while Mayer goes on at length about McKay, she somehow fails to inform the elite readership of the New Yorker that the gordita-muncher sits on the board of Obama’s own secret money machine, Priorities USA, last seen accusing Mitt Romney of murder.
A similar cognitive blind spot must be responsible for the bizarre way in which Mayer handles Dreamworks CEO and Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of Obama’s biggest supporters and a multi-million-dollar donor to Priorities USA.
Mayer writes: “Katzenberg has been invited to a state dinner at the White House, but he has never met privately with the President.” No, not privately. Just publicly: Are we really to believe Obama had no meaningful interaction with one of his biggest donors during the White House event? Obama has called Katzenberg “an extraordinary friend,” and a “remarkable” man. Why does Mayer not report on the $15 million fundraiser Katzenberg co-sponsored at George Clooney’s home, where the president said,
I want to thank Jeffery not just for this evening but for his tenacious support and advocacy since we started back in 2007. He has just been consistently been there for me through thick and through thin. Sometimes the 2008 campaign gets romanticized and everybody says how perfect it was and I have to remind them, no, I was there. (Laughter.) And the only person I don’t have to remind is Jeffery, because he was there through all the ups and downs. And occasionally he would call and say, Barack, I don’t think things are working the way they’re supposed to. (Laughter.) But no matter where we were and what phase we were in, in that campaign, he stuck with us. And over the last three and a half years he’s remained just an extraordinary friend.
So, Jeffery, thank you for everything you’ve done. (Applause.)
Earlier this year Katzenberg was among the guests at a private luncheon at Vice President Biden’s residence for Xi Jinping, who is presumed to become the next president of China this fall. Katzenberg required Xi’s personal approval for a major deal to open an animation studio in China. Dreamworks, meanwhile, is under investigation by the SEC for its dealings with China. Needless to say, none of this shows up in Mayer’s “report.” …
Andrew Malcolm catches President Narcissist with another jawdropper. Here’s the whole post.
Barack Obama has become accustomed to being the center of attention. For many like him, that’s one of the biggest appeals of politics, the television exposure it attracts and the power that seems to come with that instant recognition and fame. “As Advertised on TV”
When you walk into a room now where pre-screened people have paid sometimes $40,000 just to be in your earthly presence, people stand, heads turns, lips whisper and hands clap. That’s a heady experience, even if you weren’t raised by grandparents because your birth parents chose to be absent. A modest upbringing, it seems, does not guarantee modesty.
Although Obama’s school grades remain sealed secrets, he’s often been told that he’s intelligent and interesting and articulate.
To quote the 20th century American philosopher Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be king!”
Obama was in New York City again last night (yes, money). It seems he wants four more years of attention; never mind the doing nothing. So, he must appear to mingle and recognize and shine his large smile on donor faces.
While others cash the checks because, unexpectedly, Obama’s way behind now in the political popularity contest measured with dollars as the votes. Another reason to dislike that poised former governor fellow, who thanks people.
It’s one thing to play off the fame of Sarah J. Parker and Anna Don’t-Be-Late. In Obama’s world, they’re merely useful. But it’s quite another to be in the presence of Michael Jordan and other NBA brethren, who’ve accomplished real things in their life’s work that Obama could only dream of.
Even though, you know, friends and staff, tell the president that his basketball skills could have taken him well beyond Hawaii gyms.
Anyway, it seems all this struck the president of the United States at the top of his remarks to the Lincoln Center crowd filled with numerous basketball luminaries. He said no, it’s OK, he understands others getting the attention.
He didn’t say anything about liking it:
“It is very rare I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person. Usually the folks want to take a picture with me, sit next to me, talk to me. That has not been the case at this event and I completely understand.”
You knew Jennifer Rubin would have at this.
In any White House, it is easy to develop a siege mentality and reject not only criticism but the facts on which that criticism is based. This presidency is particularly susceptible to this malady because of President Obama’s acute narcissism.
Even, or maybe especially, his humor reflects his self-absorption. Where President George W. Bush was self-deprecating, Obama is self-satisfied. That’s how he winds up with cringe-inducing lines such as this at the NBA fundraiser: “It is very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth- or sixth-most interesting person.” (He’s not interesting by the way. Clinton was interesting;Obama is drearily predictable.) The comment is so intellectually needy, you wind up admiring Bush and Ronald Reagan, neither of whom would dream of saying such a thing, even in jest. …
James Pethokoukis has the facts to counter the claim that Obama’s ‘recovery’ created more jobs than Reagan’s. That was from Stephanie Cutter. Or is that Gutter?
… Just how do the Obama and Reagan recoveries stack up in terms of jobs?
• From the end of the recession in June 2009 through July 2012 — the first 37 months of the Obama recovery — the U.S. economy has generated 2.7 million net new jobs. From the jobs low point in February 2010, the U.S. economy has generated 4 million net new jobs.
From the end of the 1981-82 recession through the end of 1985 — the first 37 months of the Reagan recovery — the U.S.created 9.8 million net new jobs. And if you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the comparable figure is more than 12 million jobs. …
John Steele Gordon posts on the CU prediction of Romney romp.
Predicting the outcome of elections is big business. In the early days it was left to political professionals who would rely on their gut instincts to “feel” how the campaign was developing. This is not dissimilar to Wall Streeters who can “read the tape” to sense which way particular stocks will move. In the mid-20th century scientific polling developed, but with occasional spectacular failures. The Literary Digest poll in 1936 predicted an Alf Landon victory over FDR. Landon carried only Maine and Vermont. Everybody was wrong about the outcome of the 1948 election, epitomized by the picture of a triumphant Harry Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with its premature headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.
In recent years, Intrade has allowed people to bet real money on the outcomes of elections, in effect measuring the gut instincts of the many. It currently has Obama’s chances at 57.3 percent and Mitt Romney at 42.3 percent.
And, of course, political science professors try as well to read the tea leaves. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia is probably seen more often on television than other professor. He currently has the race at 237 electoral votes safe, likely, or leaning to Obama, 206 to Romney, with 95 in the tossup category.
Two professors at the University of Colorado, Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, have developed a prediction model based not on polling or gut instincts, but on economic factors in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia:
According to their analysis, President Barack Obama will win 218 votes in the Electoral College, short of the 270 he needs. And though they chiefly focus on the Electoral College, the political scientists predict Romney will win 52.9 percent of the popular vote to Obama’s 47.1 percent, when considering only the two major political parties. . . .
“What is striking about our state-level economic indicator forecast is the expectation that Obama will lose almost all of the states currently considered as swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida,” Bickers said.
You can take this for what it’s worth, but I will point out that this model has correctly predicted the outcome for every presidential election beginning in 1980.
Salon notes Indiana pot growers are having a tough summer.
Police say marijuana growing operations in southern Indiana are easy to spot from the air because of the drought.
An airplane pilot guided troopers on the ground through browning forests and corn fields Tuesday to uncover grow sites in Clark, Scott and Harrison counties. The troopers cut down more than 100 marijuana plants.
Sgt. Jerry Goodin tells The Courier-Journal the resilient green marijuana plants “stick out like a sore thumb.”
Trooper Mike Bennett tells The News and Tribune that marijuana can flourish in harsh conditions, pointing out, “It’s not called weed for nothing.”
Bennett says the seized plants will be destroyed once a burn ban is lifted.
He says the owners of property where marijuana grows are rarely arrested, because most “have no idea that it’s growing on their land.”